Breaking Barriers in Utility Billing Through Automation and Affordability
By Pat Ricks, Senior Consultant
As a utility professional, I have attended many conferences; with each one, I can honestly say I walked away with no less than one or two “good insights” in my pocket that I thought would bring value to the company and or our customers; however, in many of those sessions I walked away with a pocket full of “great stuff.” During the recent Chartwell EMACS Conference, one breakout session had my pockets overflowing—Revolutionizing Billing with Automation, Analytics, and Affordability Index, presented by Entergy and Georgia Power Company.
In this breakout, there was something for just about everyone in the room, but what I liked most about this session was that the presenters perfectly straddled the very fine line of discussing complex data projects in a manner that both non-data-centric and data-centric attendees could grasp at their own level of knowledge and expertise.
Jacqueline “Jackie” Gray, Senior Manager for Entergy’s Billing Center of Excellence and Billing and Payment Council member, shared how Entergy’s strategy to address affordability includes focusing on improving customer billing using practical billing solutions such as BOTS, workflow automation, and advanced performance dashboards to boost visibility, reduce manual effort, and drive smarter decision-making with bill exceptions.
These enhancements leveraged technology to clear billing failures, reduce customer complaints, and aggregate the net metering billing process, ultimately leading to significant cost savings resulting from this work – including a 99.6% reduction in delayed bills, 95% reduction in aggregate net meter bill exceptions, and a reduction in offshore headcount by 55%.
Oxana Humphreys, Data Scientist Manager for Georgia Power Company (GPC) and member of the Vulnerable Customer Council, opened her presentation by sharing that GPC has put a stake in the ground with its Affordability Strategy, freezing base rates for the next three years. To support this effort, GPC set a goal of increasing awareness, education, and utilization of low-to-moderate income affordability programs.
As part of this effort, GPC’s Data Science Team went to work by developing an Affordability Risk Model to help their Outreach Team. This model utilizes customer demographics, usage, contact, payment, arrears, and rate inputs to predict (with 90% accuracy) the possibility that a customer will experience a shut-off for non-payment, and thereby enable GPC’s Outreach Team to prioritize and target their efforts to at-risk customers that can immediately benefit from GPC’s affordability programs.
➡️ Learn more about the Billing and Payment Council and/or the Vulnerable Customer Council by contacting Tim Herrick.
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